reported Weapons and sometimes aircraft flicker or derender.

[SspectrumM]

Have you noticed that the flickering only happens to clients? It doesn't affect the host.

 

-RTX 2080 Super (Driver Version 556.14)
-Ryzen 9 5900X
-Ram 64gb DD4 
-Windows 11
-No Overclocking
-No Mods 

Edited December 7, 2024 by SspectrumM

[Biggus]

On 12/7/2024 at 11:28 AM, SspectrumM said:

Have you noticed that the flickering only happens to clients? It doesn't affect the host.

 

-RTX 2080 Super (Driver Version 556.14)
-Ryzen 9 5900X
-Ram 64gb DD4 
-Windows 11
-No Overclocking
-No Mods 

Haven't noticed because I'm running a dedicated server.

Somehow tied into all of this is that sometimes aircraft appear to fly really weirdly.  Like they're being slewed at odd attitudes.  I'd assumed it was AI only, until this happened:

I was on the server by myself.  Had noticed some weapons flicker occurring but hadn't yet seen any aircraft disappearing or failing to render.  I've attached the server track and log as well as my client log, and I can supply a client track if required.  Mods had not yet been removed at the time of this happening, but I figured that what happened here was unusual enough that it might prove to be useful.

dcs - client.log Server - bug track.trk dcs - server bug.log

Edited December 12, 2024 by Biggus
Edited to embed vid

[SspectrumM]

 

[Biggus]

Had another instance of this bug appear last night.

Weapons flicker was evident, aircraft rendering issues on display in this clip:

 

First part of the vid is not long after spawning in.  Two AI F-4s are on the ramp awaiting their takeoff time which was roughly half an hour into the mission run time.  After a short sortie, I returned to rearm and refuel and noticed that the AI that was glitching had stopped rendering entirely.  It later took off with it's wingman on it's mission.  I ended the mission shortly after observing that.  It is possible that the glitching aircraft bug is separate to the weapons flicker, but in my experience if you have one of these issues appear in the mission, the other will also appear too at some point.

Client log reported the following after checking with the discord log analyzer:

Quote

ERROR   Lua::Config (Main): Call error StatusBarDialog.setEulerAngles:[string "Scripts/UI/StatusBarDialog.lua"]:580: bad argument #3 to 'sprintf' (string expected, got nil)
stack traceback:
    [C]: ?
    [C]: in function 'sprintf'
    [string "Scripts/UI/StatusBarDialog.lua"]:580: in function <[string "Scripts/UI/StatusBarDialog.lua"]:579>.
2024-12-11 09:38:24.630 WARNING LOG (9556): 12 duplicate message(s) skipped.

I'm pretty sure I've seen the bug appear without this error appearing in the log, but it seems to crop up from time to time even after multiple repairs.

Only mods on client are SRS and Tacview.  Server side has those plus Olympus.  Bug predates installation of both Tacview and Olympus, and is not evident in every mission.

There is an error in the server log related to Olympus, however as mentioned this bug predates the Olympus install.  I'll see if I can re-run the mission without Olympus later on to confirm, but as it's a Retribution mission and the state saving function can mess with things when replaying missions, I expect to see other errors there.

Server track.

Client track.

Server and client have had their XMP profiles disabled.

Server dcs.log dcs client with flicker.log retribution_nextturn.miz

 

Edit:  Re-ran the mission.  Tacview was still enabled unfortunately, as I'm not quite sure how to disable it without uninstalling on a dedicated server.  Same thing occurred with that same AI phantom, at which point I ended the mission so that I'd have a more manageable trackfile.  You may not see the weapon flickering in this track, however if the mission had continued to run it would have appeared eventually.  I just wanted to have a usable trackfile for the bug report.

Attaching server log as 2nd dcs server log.log, client log as 2nd client dcs.log and client trackfile as retribution_nextturn-20241212-105016.trk.  Server log throws an error relating to Retribution as predicted.  I also noticed that the server pagefile was quite low in the original log and increased it to 32GB in the second round of logs.  Didn't seem to help.

 

2nd dcs server log.log retribution_nextturn-20241212-105016.trk 2nd client dcs.log

Edited December 12, 2024 by Biggus
Additional testing.

[tikijoetots37]

This has flickering thing has been driving me crazy as well. Just a shot in the dark.... I've noticed that anything I play that is not a Retribution mission on my dedicated server seems to work just fine, no flickering at all... that I've noticed. Just playing single one off missions, or other stuff and everything seems to work just fine. But the flickering happens 100% of the time when playing my Retribution campaigns. Wondering if that is the same for you all?

[Biggus]

On 12/14/2024 at 8:59 AM, tikijoetots37 said:

This has flickering thing has been driving me crazy as well. Just a shot in the dark.... I've noticed that anything I play that is not a Retribution mission on my dedicated server seems to work just fine, no flickering at all... that I've noticed. Just playing single one off missions, or other stuff and everything seems to work just fine. But the flickering happens 100% of the time when playing my Retribution campaigns. Wondering if that is the same for you all?

95% of the missions my server runs are Retribution, but not every one of those missions exhibits the flickering as far as I'm aware.  I'll load up a TTI mission this week and test it for a few days.  One additional thing I've noticed is that client crashes tend to be after more than 30 minutes, most often in the 40-50 minute range following mission start.  I wonder if late activated units spawning has something to do with it?

[Nealius]

I ran one MP flight a couple days ago on Syria, with fog, and had no flickering. The only common denominators with the flights I've experienced flickers on have been scripts like MOOSE and AIRBOSS, and presence of the super carrier. The one time I did not have flickering, neither of those scripts or assets were in the mission.

[Biggus]

Two nights (~4-5 hours of uptime in total) with the TTI mission for PG, there have been zero client crashes.  I haven't had so few issues with DCS either as client or server in months.  No evident weapons flicker, no evident aircraft flicker, no unrendered aircraft, no weirdly flying aircraft.  Interesting as TTI includes MOOSE, AIRBOSS and the super carrier.  I'll continue testing for the a few more days and possibly roll the mission over to another large one like Operation Snowfox.

I suspect it's a DCS bug and not a Liberation/Retribution bug, although those generators might be really efficient at building missions that exhibit the issue.

[Raffson]

On 12/13/2024 at 10:59 PM, tikijoetots37 said:

This has flickering thing has been driving me crazy as well. Just a shot in the dark.... I've noticed that anything I play that is not a Retribution mission on my dedicated server seems to work just fine, no flickering at all... that I've noticed. Just playing single one off missions, or other stuff and everything seems to work just fine. But the flickering happens 100% of the time when playing my Retribution campaigns. Wondering if that is the same for you all?

And that's exactly what makes me think this is rather an issue on Liberation/Retribution's end. I've been trying to systematically rip certain pieces out of a Retribution mission to see if it suddenly stops flickering, and thus hopefully stop the freezes that most people are experiencing (the two seem to be related, though it's merely an educated guess at this point). So far I think I've ruled out that it's a script issue, but I might need to double check because it's easy to miss the needle in this haystack

On 12/16/2024 at 1:59 AM, Nealius said:

I ran one MP flight a couple days ago on Syria, with fog, and had no flickering. The only common denominators with the flights I've experienced flickers on have been scripts like MOOSE and AIRBOSS, and presence of the super carrier. The one time I did not have flickering, neither of those scripts or assets were in the mission.

Liberation/Retribution uses MIST, not MOOSE, nor do we use AIRBOSS afaik. Supercarriers is an option, but somehow I doubt that it's related. But if you can point me to a non-Liberation/Retribution mission that exhibited these issues, I might be able to narrow the search...

 

That said, the issue seems to be originating from a feature in the mission generator that is common between Liberation & Retribution, but I still can't put my finger on what it might actually be

[Vakarian]

It's not Retribution/Liberation/Mist/Moose... whatever related.

We had a mission in my group the day the Fog patch landed. Mission was made after the patch dropped and had literally this: Dynamic spawns on Wujah and Beirut airfields, 1x SA-8 at Rayak airfield, uncontrolled AI MiG-21s, Su-24s, Mi-8s, few active infantry dudes and 3 static buildings from now in DCS core.

No mods, pure 100% vanilla DCS. Some of us still experienced flickering.

[BIGNEWY]

Ive not been able to reproduce this yet, I have asked the team to look out for it however. 

thank you

Edit: team just informed me there is a related issue reported, so thank you for the logs